California Grubbing

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Kids often have a tremendous sense of entitlement. Well, there are a lot of kids in California colleges — and running them.

You probably have heard about the University of California Regents voting yesterday for a 32-percent tuition hike over the next two years. Not surprisingly, many students are angry, some enough that they were arrested protesting outside the Regents’ meeting.

Now, a 32 percent hike over two years isn’t small. But here’s the thing: California has typically charged students very little relative to both state taxpayer funding and national averages. As you can see in the chart below, which uses data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, net per-pupil tuition revenue (meaning revenue from tuition minus any state financial aid) in California has hovered around $1,200 over the last 25 years, and has only gone up about $18 per year. Meanwhile, state taxpayers have been shelling out around $7,300 per pupil per year. So state taxpayers have been furnishing the vast majority of funding for California college students, and students have done very little to make up the vast gulf between what they pay and what taxpayers shell out.

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